


The Night Phil Coulson Played Hooky

by Chibifukurou



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 14:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibifukurou/pseuds/Chibifukurou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He crowed, "Coulson is totally playing hooky!"</p><p>He could hear Natasha's sigh buzz over the phone. "Just because he didn't notice you take your bike out doesn't mean he's playing hooky, Clint. It means that he's assuming that you were actually listening to his last lecture on living in the ventilation ducts.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night Phil Coulson Played Hooky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smaragdbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smaragdbird/gifts).



> Written for the Avengers Xchange over at LJ. A huge thank you to Celeste9 who did an amazing job betaing on short notice.

Clint had known Coulson for a long time, though maybe not as long as some of his other assets. Clint had only been with S.H.I.E.L.D for the last eight years.  Coulson had gone straight from college to being one of the most decorated Rangers in US history to being one of S.H.I.E.L.D  's best agents over the course of a four year period that had been wiped from history.

And you didn't know wiped from history until you'd had a scary Soviet superspy help you search through every record keeping location on file in the S.H.I.E.L.D   database.

So Clint felt pretty confident considering himself the resident expert on all things Agent Coulson and he also felt safe to say that this was not normal behavior for one Senior Agent Phil Coulson.

Seriously? Who did Coulson think he was fooling sneaking out of the back super secret exit of S.H.I.E.L.D   headquarters? It was like he wasn't even trying to be stealthy. Or possibly like he actually expected Clint to have listened to that two hour lecture he'd given on not staying overnight in Headquarters' ventilation system. When had Clint ever listened to Coulson's lectures?

That time in Budapest totally didn't count.

 So Clint did the only logical thing for any self-respecting field agent to do. He crawled through the ventilation system, until he was in the section right above the underground parking lot. It would take Coulson at least two minutes to get there on foot.

Which meant that Clint had just enough time to kick out the grate that covered the outtake vent and use his slingshot to land a micro-tracker on the back bumper of Coulson's perfectly ordinary looking black station wagon. Seriously, what had Coulson been thinking when he'd gone for that car? Sure, it had room for Coulson's favorite rocket launcher, but Clint was sure that S.H.I.E.L.D  's armory specialists could have found a way to fit a nice rocket launcher sized compartment in a sexier car.

He had a moment of nerves when Coulson inspected the back of his station wagon for a few seconds longer than normal before sending a glare in the general direction of the vent where Clint was hiding, but he didn't dislodge the tracker or shoot the vent so Clint was calling it a total WIN!

Once he was sure that Coulson had traveled at least two blocks out of the garage without stopping to dispose of the tracker, he scurried out of hiding and down to his bike.

He shoved the helmet on, revved the engine and headed for the exit, going a respectable ten miles over the speed-limit. "Call Natasha," he ordered into the mike at the front of his helmet.

The Bluetooth dinged and then a few seconds later the buzzing of Natasha's phone echoed through the helmet. It was a little distracting, but not enough to keep him from pulling out into traffic at breakneck speed to a chorus of honks and squealing tires. In his mirrors he could see that at least five drivers were giving him the finger.

Not quite his record, but still pretty good. He considered yelling something rude, but Natasha's voice distracted him before he could decide what to say. "What do you want, Barton? I am in the middle of something."

"Is somebody trying to shoot you?"

"No," she growled.

"Is it your weekly knitting club?"

Her silence was answer enough. In fact he was willing to bet that she was currently contemplating the hundred plus ways she could kill him with yarn and knitting needles.

"This is waaay better!" he wheedled.

"We've had this discussion before, Clint. Going out drinking or to a gay bar together is not 'way better' than anything."

"Oh come on. I've only done that like five times!"

"Twenty three … and a half if you count that time you attempted to get us into a lesbian bar for their wet t-shirt contest."

"Really? I could have sworn it was less than that." He swerved around some jack-ass who thought that Clint should actually follow the 'rules of the road' instead of winding in and out of cars. Like hell he was going to miss busting Coulson cause he was busy playing nice.

"Clint, is that honking I hear?"

Oops, busted. "Maybe?"

She sighed. "Unless I am mistaken..." Her tone made it clear she most definitely was not  mistaken. "Coulson refused to get your license reinstated after that time you caused a national security incident by running the Latverian diplomat’s car off the road…and into a lightpost."

"Well…"

"Fine, I'm going to regret this. But what exactly is cool enough that you are willing to have me rat you out to Coulson for driving?"

He crowed, "Coulson is totally playing hooky!"

"Just because he didn't notice you take your bike out doesn't mean he's playing hooky, Clint. It means that he's assuming that you were actually listening to his latest lecture on living in the ventilation ducts.”

"Oh come on! When do I ever listen to Coulson's lectures?"

"Besides that time in Budapest?"

"Tasha! You promised not to talk about that unless one of us was about to risk our lives."

He could hear the soft click of her packing up her knitting supplies. "As I recall Coulson told you that the next time he caught you in the vents, he was having Fury give you the next lecture. That counts as taking your life into your own hands."

"He wouldn't really…"

She whispered something in soft Russian to the rest of her knitting club. It was muffled. She'd probably put her hand over her phone's speaker, but he could still hear well enough to pick up the words 'brother' and 'idiot'.

He swerved between a couple of gridlocked cabs and down a back alley that would lead to a one way street going in the opposite direction. Once he could hear clearly again, he asked, "What exactly have you been telling your knitting friends about me?"

"Only that you were dropped on your head as a child."

He pulled out of the alley and right into traffic, just in time to almost get run over by a granny with an extremely foul mouth. He didn't think he'd heard someone curse in Italian like that since he and Tasha had that mission in Sicily.

"So now that you've ruined my night, what exactly am I going to have to bail you out of this time?" Now there was the rumble of an engine on Tasha's side of the phone as well.

"I told you. Coulson is totally playing hooky!"

"And I told you that not catching you in the vents isn't playing hooky."

"I know that!"

There was a mumble from Tasha's end that sounded an awful lot like, 'I highly doubt that,' which Clint chose to ignore.

"I mean that he's playing hooky because he snuck out the back entrance at headquarters and took his station wagon of DOOM on a road trip."

Screeching and a very colorful string of curses emanated from Tasha's end of the phone.

"Tash?"

"Please, tell me you aren't following him."

"Well…"

"You truly were dropped on your head as a child. I am going home and when you inevitably end up with a number of new bullet holes I am going to laugh…hard."

"Tasha!"

The dial tone echoed through his helmet instead of an answer.

"Stupid Coulson and Tasha keeping secrets," he muttered before ordering, "End call."

Without Tasha to distract him, he was able to turn more of his attention to the tracking signal's screen.

Well, what little he could spare while trying to piss off every driver he passed, at least. Coulson was still heading towards the center of the city. Just like he had been for the last fifteen minutes.

 

Which was just creepy. Coulson didn’t go straight anywhere. Unless you counted only doubling back three times instead of his usual paranoid five.

Clint was beginning to think this might be a trap. His luck Fury would be waiting at whatever location Coulson was heading to, ready and willing to give him the requisite lecture for agents who think headquarters is their home.

Itwas a two hour long torture session that included two PowerPoint presentations thanks to Maria's sadistic streak.

And Fury has been known to punish the agents that make him waste his time giving lectures by giving them babysitting duties. Clint shuddered dramatically and almost ran into the side of a cab for his trouble.

Seriously, somebody needed to tell those cabbies that it was rude to try and run motorcycle riders off the road. Seriously, this was New York; you'd think they'd know to expect somebody to drive between the lanes.

Coulson's tracker stopped pretty much dead center of the city. Somewhere in the forest of skyscrapers owned by the people that Clint was under express orders not to piss off.

Which was why when he tracked Coulson's station wagon to the parking deck beneath Stark Tower, he was tempted to abort the whole mission.

Admittedly the presence of Stark pretty much guaranteed that Fury wasn't going to be anywhere in a mile radius of the building, but if Fury had to give him both the 'Living at Headquarters' and the 'Don't fraternize with the enemy' lectures his head would probably explode.

And if it didn't he'd wish it had. Agent Hamilton, the last agent  to require two consecutive lectures from Director Fury, had ended up being assigned to the position of Maria Hill's Personal Assistant.

He'd never been the same again.

If he was smart he'd turn right back around and find some bar in the area that he could use as an excuse for why he had been heading in the same direction as Coulson.

He considered it -- for like ten seconds -- then he stashed his bike in a nearby alleyway and snuck into the garage. He paused only long enough to retrieve his tracking device from the back of Coulson's bumper before using a conveniently placed out-take vent to get into the ventilations system.

It was a tighter squeeze than the S.H.I.E.L.D   vents. Stark probably didn't think about things like shoulder width when he was building. Still, it wasn't bad compared to some of the places Clint had gotten into. Except for a few uncomfortably tight corners and turns he could get around by resorting to an army crawl, all elbows and knees.

The first thirty floors of Stark tower seemed to be made up of offices and conference rooms. Nothing interesting and no sign of Coulson.

It was only when he hit floor thirty-three, the third floor of R & D, that he ran into a problem. After floor thirty-two the ventilation appeared to be a completely closed system, which was completely unfair.

How was a guy supposed to get around?

He ended up having to back up to floor thirty-one, where he could get out of the vents and into a tiny cubical like office without being seen.

The scientist whose office he was invading had kindly left a lab coat on the back of his chair.  It took a little longer to locate an access card. He ended up having to invade a corner office and dig through the drawers before he could find one with the clearance he needed and he was still going to have to be careful to make sure nobody looked at it closely. Because he was pretty sure nobody was going to mistake him for a four foot nine Asian chick with coke-bottle glasses.

The elevator slid open without a problem though, so at least he wasn't going to have to bullshit that too. He wasn't great with hacking electric locks and he really didn't want to have to jump out a window and climb the side of the building.

Spidey might be able to make that work, but it wasn't really Clint's style.

He pressed the button for floor thirty-six, the last floor before the penthouse levels. The buttons for those levels were locked behind a metal sheet with the tale-tell buzz of a biometric scanner.

Hopefully he'd be able to get back into the vents from the thirty-sixth floor. Although…he looked up at the hatch on the top of the elevator. Maybe there was an easier way.

He was balancing on tiptoes, using the handlebars attached mid-way up the wall to try and reach the hatch, when the doors dinged and an English voice that practically dripped sarcasm echoed through the elevator. "Agent Coulson, your guest has arrived."

Clint was so shocked he lost his grip and ended up on his back. Twisting, he scrambled to look at least a little less guilty.

From the smirk Coulson was aiming his way he hadn't succeeded. Of course once he started trying to avoid looking at Coulson, he realized what exactly Coulson was doing in Stark tower.

Tony Stark was leaning against Coulson's side, shirt half untucked and hair sticking out in every direction.  And unless Clint was mistaken (which he totally wasn't), those were hickies on their necks.

He whistled. "Way to go, Boss! I bet Fury's going to have an aneurysm when he hears about this."

Stark cackled. Maybe he wasn't as bad as the S.H.I.E.L.D   rumor mill had made him out to be. 

Coulson just sighed. "Tony, I'd like you to meet my asset, Clint."

Clint moved forward to hold out his hand to shake. Because no matter what Natasha said he was capable of acting civilized.

Stark didn't take it. Instead he just stared at Clint, like he was some kind of new experiment. Then he said, "Is this the one who was dropped on his head as a child?"

Never mind… Stark was totally as bad as the rumor mill made him out to be.  

Coulson was still the devil though. After all, he was betting that Stark wasn't the one who'd set him up for this little meeting.

When he tried to glare at Coulson, he just got a flash of twinkly eyes for his trouble.

Stupid evil mastermind handler. Clint should have known better than to follow him. Still…this hadn't been a complete waste of his night. He moved forward to sling an arm over Stark's shoulder and steer him towards the bar. "So has Coulson told you about his little obsession with Captain America?"

"Hawkeye!" Coulson hissed.

They both ignored him. This was going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

 


End file.
